The research project Listening to Climate Change explored sound and new media formats for producing sensory knowledge about climate change, while actively engaging citizens with the ecological crisis through listening and sonic interaction. Drawing from sound art, acoustic ecology, new media and climate change research this project brought together sound’s experiential and immersive qualities with scientific facts to investigate environmental perception across temporal and spatial scales. The project generated a speculative sonic process that allows the transformation of environmental sounds based on climate change scenarios. By introducing a non-human perspective to the transformation of sounds and the listening experience, this approach offers new insights into the perception of climate change impacts such as extreme weather, biodiversity loss and environmental modification. Another output of the project is ClimaSynth, a web-based interactive application that invites listeners to creatively process environmental sound recordings in response to drought scenarios and speculative prompts. The resulting sounds provide reimagined versions of existing soundscapes as a way to navigate and speculate on future states of landscapes and environments.
The project was undertaken by Dr. Eleni-Ira Panourgia with guidance and mentorship from Prof. Dr. Angela Brennecke and was funded with an Individual Grant by Postdoc Network Brandenburg.